The Secret of Life Page 7

  “But that’s all backwards. Drinking cuts youoff from the world.”

  “From the ordinary world, sure. But there’s a deeper reality. I can feel it. With you, I can feel it, as much as with drinking. We connect, we understand each other. It’s the secret of life.”

  “What is?” “Feeling connected instead of cut off. Under the surface, the whole world is one thing. You and I are like ... finger-puppets on God’s hand. Or eyes on a giant jellyfish.”

  “That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

  “I don’t mean it that way. I love you, Audrey. That’s what I want to say. I love you much more than drinking.” “I’m glad.” They kissed a little more, and then Audrey thought of another question. “Didn’t you once tell me that you can fly?” “Yes. But only when it’s life-and-death. It’s some kind of weird survival trait I have.” “Oh, sure.” “No, really. In high school I was in a car accident, and I flew around a tree. And last month I flew off the trestle to save myself.”

  “Couldn’t you fly for me a little right now?”

  “You promise not to tell anyone if I show you?”

  “I promise.”

  “OK. Let’s sneak up to your dorm room.” Audrey lived on the third floor.

  “No funny business!”

  “Don’t worry, Audrey, I’m a Southern gentleman!”

  Boys weren’t allowed to enter the girls’ dorm at night. But people did it all the time. You could climb up the thick wisteria vines, or you could sneak up the back stairs. Audrey went in the main door and opened the back door for Conrad. Whispering and giggling, they hurried up to her room.

  It was nice in Audrey’s room, tidy and well arranged. There were stuffed animals, and French books, and empty wine bottles with philodendron vines growing in them. Conrad let himself imagine that he lived here with her. “Don’t make any noise, Conrad, I could get suspended for this.” “Just move those bottles and open your window.” “You’re going to climb down?” “I’m going tofly down!” “Don’t, Conrad, you might hurt yourself. You don’t really have to fly to impress me.” “But Ican !” “Have you done this before?” “Not really. I’ve been scared. But you make me feel strong enough.” “Well, don’t kill yourself!” She cleared off the windowsill and threw open the big sash window. Sweet spring air wafted in. Conrad crouched in the window and leaned forward.

  For a second he thought he was flying, but he was wrong. He was crashing down through the wisteria vines that covered Audrey’s dorm, crashing down feet-first. He fell about ten feet before he managed to get hold of a thick piece of the vine. The jolt almost tore his arm out of its socket, but the vine held.

  Moaning softly, Conrad climbed the rest of the way down. He could hear Audrey giggling overhead. When he got to the bottom, he looked up and gave a jaunty wave.

  “See?”

  “What happened, Conrad?”

  “I ... I guess it wasn’t dangerous enough.”

  “You’re incredible. I’m going to miss you this summer.”

  Chapter 11:

  Thursday, March 4, 1965 “Hey, Pig.”

  “Say, Ace. Look at this.” Conrad was alone in his filthy room, looking at a piece of paper. He was a sophomore now. Last spring’s happy love seemed far away. “It’s a letter from Dean Potts.”

  “ ‘Dear Conrad,’ ” Ace read aloud. “ ‘I received a copy of the bill from the house director concerning room damage in your suite in A section. The amount of damage astonishes me since it is the largest bill of this sort I have seen. I cannot imagine legitimate excuses for this kind of destruction ...’ ” Ace broke off and handed the letter back. “Do you still have the knife?”

  “Oh, yeah. My ninety-three-dollar Target Master throwing knife. Three dollars for the knife and ninety for the damages. It was those holes in the plaster that really got them. They sent bills to my parents and to Platter’s parents.”

  “What did Platter’s parents say?”

  “They said, ‘Ron, that’s what happens when you get in with a bad crowd.’ You’re going to have to pay his half, Ace. You were the one who always threw the knife at the wall on purpose.”

  “Let’s get drunk.”

  “Age, wheels, and bread, Ace. We’ll need all three.”

  “Florman’s always sells to you, Pig. And I stole Chuckie’s car keys.”

  “Is it still lunchtime?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK. We’ll swing by the dining hall and I’ll go through some purses.”

  “You’re a man after my own heart, Pig.”

  Conrad found six dollars in a purse in the coat racks. He felt bad stealing it, but he really needed to get drunk. Things were going very badly indeed. Audrey was unhappy, the Dean was incensed, and Conrad hadn’t been to classes in over a week.

  “Ka-ka,” said Ace, squinting through the slush on the windshield of Chuckie’s car. “The world is ka-ka.”

  “We’ll get twelve quarts,” said Conrad soothingly. “Twelve quarts of Ballantine. We’ll take them to your room, and then we’ll put them in our stomachs.”

  “Good. Feel good.”

  Conrad still roomed with Platter, but this year Ace was sharing a large suite with Chuckie Golem and Izzy Tuskman. Ace had his own bedroom, a nice big room with two windows. One window gave onto a fire escape, the other led out onto a peaked roof. It was a good place to drink. Conrad and Ace had spent most Saturdays there in the fall, drinking and being glad they weren’t at the football game. Recently they’d started drinking during the week as well. It was a constant struggle but somehow worth it. It was a way of being cool.

  “What’s with you and Audrey?” Ace asked after they’d started their first quarts.

  “It’s like Platter says: ‘The little woman is tired of playing second fiddle to Demon Rum.’ When I showed up drunk for supper yesterday, she told me she didn’t want to see me for a week.”

  “Doesn’t she realize how lovable we are when we’re drunk?”

  “Less and less people do, Ace.” Conrad sighed and rubbed his temples. He was more worried about losing Audrey than he cared to admit. “Let’s put onCast Your Fate to the Wind . I love that song. It’s like life. Touching gently and not getting through. Laughing drunk and breaking things. Walking quiet holding a girl’s hand and looking at the sky and knowing it’s all in the moment and—”

  “Being happy and ruining it on purpose so you can start over.” Ace interrupted. “Jacking off in a used rubber by the roadside while your girl is waiting in the car. Isn’t this beer going to get cold?”

  “You mean warm. Let’s put it in your bed.”

  “OK.” Ace began bustling around, happy and excited. “These are the twins,” he said, tucking two quarts under his pillow. “And little Ricky sleeps over here.” He wedged a bottle down between the mattress and the wall. “The neighbor kids go here.” He put six quarts under the quilt in the middle of the bed. “And Celia has her own room.” The last bottle went down at the foot of the bed.

  The afternoon waned on pleasantly. When Ace and Conrad got tired ofCast Your Fate to the Wind , they began listening toChuck Berry’s Greatest Hits . That was an album you could listen to for a long time. So that they wouldn’t have to keep getting up to piss, they started pissing in the empty quart bottles.

  It kept you on your toes—not to pick up the wrong bottle—and you could compare input and output.

  They started grooving.

  Ace: “Dean Potts should be here.”

  Pig: “So we could slit his throat.”

  Ace: “And rig it like a junk OD.” Pig: “His twisted body on the tracks.”

  Ace: “Blackmail snaps of homo love.”

  Pig: “And books with Platter’s name.”

  Ace: “They’d have a Quaker service.”

  Pig: “And we could give a speech.”

  Ace: “Nothing’s wrong with being square.”

  Pig: “Sperm, alcohol, and death.”

  Suddenly most of the beer was gone and Ace was turn
ing ugly. He lurched across the room and punched out a windowpane. “You see that, Pig? No cuts.” Ace held up his white fist. “The thing is tojerk through

  . No wimp hesitation.” He punched out another pane.

  “Don’t go breaking all the windows, Ace. I don’t want to get in any more trouble this week.”

  “Candy-ass. You joke about death, but you’re really scared shitless. Dig.” Ace opened the window and hopped out onto the roof. There was a thick crust of ice and snow out there. Face set in angry brooding, Ace began tightrope-walking backward along the roof’s slippery peak.

  “Hey, come on, Ace,” said Conrad, leaning out the window. “Iknow you have more guts than me. Big deal,man .” The roof sloped down to a sheer fifty-foot drop on either side.

  Ace made it out to the end of the roof, but then he took one step too many. He disappeared as suddenly as a duck in a shooting gallery. Conrad had been tensed for this. For the first time since the trestle, his power was back. He flew out the window, along the roof, and down to tumbling Ace, still fifteen feet above the ground. He got his arms around Ace’s chest, and with a feeling of digging into Nothingness, Conrad managed to brace himself and slow Ace’s deadly fall. They touched down on the ground without a jolt.

  “Jesus, Conrad!”

  “I can’t always do it. So don’t fall off the roof again, shithook.”

  They went back to Ace’s room and worked on the beer some more.

  “Does Audrey know?” Ace asked. He’d calmed down a lot in the last few minutes.

  “I’ve tried telling her, but she doesn’t really believe me. Last spring I was going to show her I could fly—I jumped out of her window. But my body knew I could catch one of the wisteria vines, so the power didn’t cut in. I can only fly when it’s a matter of life and death.”

  “You could jump off Clothier Tower. That’s like a two-hundred-foot sheer drop. Jump off at lunch hour!

  All the girls will want to fuck you. I’ll help you screen the applications.” Ace paused to open the second-to-last quart. “You know, Conrad, in China, if you save someone’s life, that means you have to take care of them forever. Will you give me half the money you get from flying?” “What money? From who? I mean if the government gets wind of it, then they’ll just draft me and use me for a suicide spy mission. I could go in the circus and pretend to be an aerialist ... but who wants to be a freak for dumb hicks? Crime might be a possibility, if I could learn tocontrol my flying, but ...”

  “Use it to invent antigravity,” suggested Ace. “That’d be big bucks for sure.” He pulled at his beer. “I can’t believe this really happened. Why shouldyou be able to fly, anyway?”

  “Jesus was a great ethical teacher, Conrad, not just some derelict who knew how to fly.”

  “Well, anyway. I mean if God—or the aliens—gave me this magic power, it must be that I’m supposed to do something important.”

  “So how come you spend all your time getting drunk?”

  “That’s part of it. I get drunk to see God, you know? When I’m drunk I feel like I know the secret of life. Know it in my body. The teachers here can’t tell me anything—they’re old and square. The answer isn’t so much a bunch of words as it is a way of feeling.”

  “The secret of life,” said Ace. “I’ll tell you when I saw the secret of life. It was the morning star. Venus, you dig? Once after my paper route there was still enough night left to get out my telescope and look at it. It was a crescent like the moon! You understand? Always get your emotions confused in what you’re doing and your mind will be sure to develop. If you want to get out and tell anyone.”

  “Of course I want to get out,” said Conrad, just to have something to say. “Venus is really a crescent?

  I’ve never seen the morning star.”

  “It’s the same as the evening star, Pig. The bright dot that you see near the moon sometimes. That’s Venus.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it. I used to look at the sky with Larsen a lot. We’d lie out on the grass and stare up at the stars.”

  “My big science friend was a guy named Table,” said Ace. “Billy Table. His father was an alcoholic stage magician. Poor Table built himself a big reflecting telescope ... sanded the mirror and everything—”

  “The Glass Giant of Palomar!”

  “Exactly! And Table’s father got mad when he was drunk and he broke the mirror.” “What a prick. My father was never like that. I don’t think he ever even hit me. Maybe once when I was drunk. He used to hit Caldwell sometimes, but by the time I was a teenager, he was worn out.”

  “Yeah, my Dad never hit me either. He always fought with my mother instead. They’re getting divorced.” Ace said this like it was nothing, but Conrad could tell it meant a lot. No wonder Ace was upset enough to fall off the roof.

  “I’m sorry, Ace.” “Can I have the last quart?”

  Conrad looked at his own lukewarm half-full quart. He’d had enough for now. “Yeah, OK. I don’t see why I can’t get laid.” “It’s because you’re such a stupid pig,” said Ace, opening the last beer. “You drink so much because you’re too lazy to do anything else.”

  “What do you mean lazy? It’s work getting money and wheels. Lazy. I just saved your life, didn’t I?

  You’re so fucked-up you practically commit suicide, and now you’re tellingme how to live?”

  “Except for Audrey,” said Conrad finally. “And, you know, I will make it, Ace, someday I’ll be a famous intellectual. And I’ll still be getting drunk.”

  “I hope so, Conrad. I hope both.”

  Chuckie and Izzy showed up about then. Chuckie was a little pissed about his car—he’d had to walk up to campus and back, in the sleet. But then Izzy found a bottle of sherry somewhere, and they all cheered up. Chuckie played his guitar, and they made up a song about Conrad calledPig, Pig, Pig, What’s the Use, Use, Use? People like Chuckie thought Conrad was a mess, but at least they could tell he was different. For now, that was enough.

  That night Conrad slept on the floor of Ace’s room. He’d hoped for another secret chat about his flying, and about his destiny, but Ace had turned mean again. Conrad’s last memory of the evening was Ace’s mock-sincere voice trying to trick him into wetting his pants. “I just did it myself, Conrad. Ahhh, it feels good. Relax. Go on and do it.” Some friend!

  When Conrad awoke, he was alone and the snow had melted. He crawled out Ace’s other window and went down the fire escape.Leaving with no love lost , Conrad thought to himself. He felt purged and happy. The earth was like a vast terrarium, moist and unseasonably warm. Things were growing.

  Life—not the secret of life—just life itself.

  To begin with, he’d get things back together with Audrey. He would give her his signet ring, the von Riemann coat of arms from his mother’s dead father.

  Chapter 12:

  Wednesday, August 25, 1965 Conrad and Audrey were sitting in the balcony of a Paris theater. The lady they were staying with had given them tickets to a girlie show.

  “Look at that man over there,” said Audrey. “He has atelescope .”

  Sure enough, a man two rows ahead of them was studying the distant pink flesh through a short black tube.

  “He must be a regular. It’s all old people here, have you noticed, Audrey?”

  “Et voila!”cried the woman onstage as she peeled off the last layer. She had her stomach sucked in, and her ribs jutted out unnaturally. Her voice was shrill with the effort of filling the cavernous theater.

  “Maintenant je fais do-do!” (“Now I’m going night-night.”) Some men in tuxedos danced out and began carrying her around on a huge platter. Her puddled breasts slid this way and that. Conrad didn’t want to get interested. “Do you want to leave, Audrey?”

  It was a hot summer night, with Paris sparkling all around them. Conrad had earned enough at a summer construction job to come visit Audrey in Geneva. Her father was a diplomat there. And now Conrad and Audrey were spending a few days in Paris with a H
ayes family friend. It was fantastic, an American dream, from basement digger toboulevardier in ten short days.

  “Your hands are so hard, Conrad.” They were strolling down a tree-lined street.

  “That’s from the tamper. You know what that is? It’s a yellow machine shaped like an outboard motor.

  But at the bottom, instead of a propeller, there’s a big flat metal foot. The whole thing hops up and down like a robot pogo stick. Most days, my job was to guide the tamper all around the dirt floor of a new basement to flatten the dirt out. It was exhausting, and then for hours I’d still feel the jerking in my arms.

  The regular workers—the black guys—stuck me with the tamper as much as possible. They called itthe hand-jive machine .”

  “Did they like you?”

  “They were nice. They treated me like anyone else. One of them, a guy named Wheatland, he’d throw back his head and scream, ‘Ah just loooove to fuck!’ He was an older guy. He’d look at me and say,

  ‘When I was yo’ age my dick be hard six days a week!’ ”

  Audrey giggled and squeezed Conrad’s hand. Ever since he’d given her his signet ring they’d gotten a lot closer. He’d been drinking less, and she’d started letting him fondle her breasts. She had wonderful breasts, with big stiff nipples. Remembering them, Conrad began hugging Audrey right there on the sidewalk. They kissed intensely.

  “Should we do it, Audrey? Do you want to fuck?”

  “Yes.” The simplicity of the answer astounded Conrad. Good thing he’d asked!

  They had a couple of drinks in a nightclub and danced a little. It was hard to pay attention to anything.

  Finally it was late enough so that their hostess was certain to be in bed. They let themselves into the apartment and sat down in the living room. Conrad had a couch in there, and Audrey was sleeping in the guest bedroom.

  “Are you sure you want to?” asked Audrey.